Walt Disney: The Cheerful Colonist Who Convinced the Planet to Pay for Its Own Fairy Tale By the time the first Eurostar disgorged its cargo of sugar-buzzed children at Marne-la-Vallée in 1992, the French had already surrendered—though not to Germans this time, but to a man who’d been dead for twenty-six years. Walt Disney, the…
Globalization’s Favorite Wide Receiver: Juju Smith-Schuster and the Absurd, Borderless Theater of NFL Stardom By Our Correspondent in Five Time Zones Simultaneously Somewhere between a TikTok dance in Pittsburgh and a quiet endorsement deal in Lagos, Juju Smith-Schuster became the world’s most accidentally successful soft-power export since K-pop. The man has never filed a trade…
CeeDee Lamb and the Global Theater of Catch-and-Release By The Foreign Desk, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the neon shrine of JerryWorld and the algorithmic bowels of TikTok, CeeDee Lamb—wide-receiver, reluctant fashion influencer, and occasional human piñata for defensive backs—has become the latest export in America’s ongoing experiment: turning kinetic talent into soft power. To the…
From the Ring to the World: Bron Breakker as a One-Man Geopolitical Metaphor By Alistair “Graveyard Shift” McTavish, filing from a bar that still thinks the Cold War is on the jukebox. In the fluorescent haze of Orlando’s WWE Performance Center—part sweat-box, part MBA case study—Bron Breakker, age 26, bench-presses 450 pounds while the algorithmic…
Jessie J and the Global Pop Machine: One Woman’s Quest to Remind Us We’re All Just Idiots with Headphones By Dave’s Locker International Bureau PARIS—If you squint past the Eiffel Tower’s nightly seizure-inducing strobe show, you’ll notice a faint, familiar wail drifting from the cafés along Rue de la Paix: “I’m feeeeelin’ sexy and freeeeee.”…
**Pop-Punk Diplomacy: How Avril Lavigne Became an Accidental Geopolitical Pawn in the Great Canadian Culture War** In the grand theater of international relations, where nuclear treaties are negotiated over canapés and trade wars erupt over dairy subsidies, one might not expect a Canadian pop-punk princess to emerge as a figure of geopolitical significance. Yet here…
Marilyn Manson: The Global Boogeyman Who Outgrew the Role By Our Correspondent, somewhere between the death-rattle of the 20th century and the auto-tuned apocalypse of the 21st It is 1997 in Jakarta. Traffic wheezes like a dying accordion, Suharto still clings to power, and a bootleg VCD of “Antichrist Superstar” is circulating through the city’s…
Nia Jax and the Collapse of Distance: How a Polynesian Samoan Superstar Became a Global Rorschach Test By the time Nia Jax (born Savelina Fanene in Sydney, raised in Honolulu, billed from “The Irresistible Force”) power-bombed another petite opponent through a commentary table last week, the clip had already ping-ponged across seventeen time zones. A…
The Killers: How a Vegas Quartet Became the World’s Guiltiest Export LAS VEGAS—Somewhere between the roulette wheel and the all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet, four pasty Mormons from Nevada decided the planet needed more songs about jealousy, casinos, and the inexplicable sex appeal of Brandon Flowers’ leather jacket. Two decades later, The Killers have metastasized into a…
The Geopolitics of a 275-Pound Edge Rusher How the world’s favorite pastime of watching large men collide became a referendum on everything from trade wars to TikTok By the time Nick Bosa’s fourth-quarter sack of Dak Prescott ricocheted across European sports-bar screens last January, the play had already been clipped, subtitled in seven languages, and…
Sally Rooney Has Conquered the Planet—Now Let’s Ask Why DUBLIN—While the rest of us were doom-scrolling through pandemic dashboards and commodity prices, a 32-year-old former debate champion from Castlebar quietly became the most exported piece of Irish soft power since Guinness. Sally Rooney’s three slender novels have been translated into 46 languages, including Catalan, Korean…
Kelly Brook: The Last British Bombshell in a World That’s Already Moved On By Dave’s Locker Global Desk London, Rome, New York, Seoul—wherever you land these days, the phrase “sex symbol” feels as quaint as a rotary phone. Yet somewhere between the algorithmic churn of TikTok torsos and the metaverse’s legless avatars, Kelly Brook still…
